Chương 13: Chapter Twelve

Tuesday October 11th Kate texted me the next day. Kate: Mission success. Drinks with Danny-boi tonight Me: Promise you'll be careful? Kate: Don't you worry I brought protection Me: … Kate: Mace. its in my bag incase he gets handy, and you'll be outside Me: lol Me: You're insane, make sure you order something expensive Kate: Oh so now I'm cheap and a hoe. I laughed at her ridiculousness and sent her a gif of a pop singer singing 'work work work work work.'

I picked up and set my phone down multiple times feeling useless. Kate was out there doing the real in person work. The dangerous stuff. Here I was just sitting in my apartment, trying desperately to make my houseplants green. Well, not just that. I'd popped over to the coffee shop for a while to use their wifi to start poking around in places that I shouldn't. Also, to just get out of the house. I was starting to pace at my windows and now understood why lions at the zoo did it.

Digital systems I was learning were both easier and harder than physical objects. I wasn't really changing anything, I was letting my computer access things as if it were someone else or someplace else. A password or permissions mismatch no longer existed. I let myself in through the H&S consumer facing webpages. They led back to the same servers and databases that the internal ones ran on.

I was able to begin to navigate through and I thought I found a trail that I could follow to take me to the internal file server and email system. I wasn't ready yet. I went through two boxes of tissues and at this point was feeling pretty weak due to the constant nose bleeds. I'd looked up anemia remedies online and was working on building back up my platelet count. I continued to hyperfixate and map the same paths into the servers until it became second nature.

I pretended that I could stop, and that I would as soon as the pain stopped and I felt strong enough for the next step. I told myself I was trying to distract myself until Kate was ready for our mission. I even had a hard time believing it. That evening I followed Kate and Daniel to the restaurant. He picked her up promptly at six and even brought flowers. Her favorite flowers. Lucky guess, I'm sure.

He'd cleaned up rather nicely and if I was unaware of the miles of lies between the two of them, I'd assume this was a completely normal date. Kate had worn a slinky black dress that shimmered in the light and draped elegantly where it needed to and seductively where it didn't. She wore her hair up and the earrings I'd gotten for her for Christmas last year shimmed on her lobes. I would never understand how she could make looking gorgeous so effortless.

I parked on the backside of the building and sat in my car waiting less than patiently for an update. Aurora was busy talking to her best friend, Celeste from the speakers of my car when I finally got a text update from Kate. Kate: Things are going well. I only have a minute I was just "freshening up in the restroom" while we waited for our food. I'll keep you updated. About twenty minutes later the next rolled in. Kate: 💚 A green heart. That meant everything was going well.

About fifteen minutes after that another update rolled through. Kate: Headed over to Daniel's now. Will text again on landing. Me: Landing? Kate: Yes AUNT MAY. I'm hoping to get lucky. A code, in case he saw the phone. I almost forgot I was in her phone as Aunt May. And hoping to get lucky meant she felt like she was getting some good information out of him. His house was on the other side of town and wasn't very impressive. I mean it was a house, so I couldn't really judge, but… I would anyway.

What else did I have going on while I was parked at the seven eleven on the corner. The house looked rundown, like no one really kept up with the maintenance and like he'd thrown an AllMart wreath and door mat on that morning. Kate's text jolted me out of my thoughts. Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation. Kate: I'm calling an uber. Shit. That was my cue.

I put my fake printed out 'UBER' label in the rear passenger window, before I started the engine and slowly drove around the block. My hands were shaking as I anticipated what she'd say. What had gone wrong. Was she okay? If she didn't come out in five minutes I was supposed to call the police. I put the car in park but before I even had another moment to worry she was rushing down the stairs from his house and opened up the rear passenger door. Daniel stood in the doorway hands on his hips looking rather upset.

She closed the door and I pulled slowly from the curb and left his neighborhood.

"Are you okay?" I asked after we turned off of his street. The adrenaline and fear had kept me from talking until I felt like we were free.

"Oh, yeah. Great." Kate offered.

"I'll tell you all about it over a glass of wine."

"You're really going to leave me in suspense?"

"I actually need to finish processing." That didn't sound good. The pit in my stomach grew as the car ride to my apartment was the longest twenty minutes of my life.

"That's uh, quite the soundtrack…" Kate said, jarring me to the present. And in the present I could hear a gratuitous amount of–well–smut. I turned off the book so quickly that I was afraid I'd wreck.

"I'm so sorry I forgot it was on." My ears felt like they were on fire.

"Oh." Kate said with a laugh.

"I thought you were just being suggestive." I laughed.

"Haha. Next time I'll plan out my seduction techniques better."

"You better." Kate threw back.

"I will have you know, I am a very sought after woman."

"I know you are. And I am soooo privileged you cut out almost every Friday from your busy dating sphere for your lowly weird hermit friend." We pulled into my parking lot and headed inside without another word. At this point the silence was driving me a bit crazy. Well–crazier than a woman who believes she's leveling up and can see the internal makings of the world and can adjust them to her every whim.

After letting us into the apartment I grabbed two wine glasses from the cupboard and before I even turned around she had the chilled wine out of the fridge and the cork already popped. We poured the glasses and she took some very unladylike gulps of the wine before closing her eyes and breathing quietly through her nose. After what I'm pretty sure was an eternity she began.

"So, Dan." She said with a very dramatic sigh.

"Dan?"

"Dan. He is an interesting person."

"... okay."

"Dan, brought my favorite flowers, took me to my favorite restaurant for first dates, and ordered my favorite meal. He knew all of my favorite songs, books and shows."

"Like… a stalker?"

"That's the weird part. Either a very very detail oriented stalker who gets so into their market research that they actually enjoy it themselves, or a very talented actor."

"What do you mean?"

"He knew one off songs that only someone who listens to those albums would know, and could recall small details of the shows or books, so he'd obviously read and watched them."

"So it was a creepy date?"

"It was actually a great date." I stared at her just blinking, mouth agape like some weird fish. This was not where I thought this conversation was heading. She continued.

"We hit it off, built trust. He invited me back to his house to check out his sound system, where we could." She held her fingers up to make quotation marks.

"Listen to his new vinyl with an otherwise unreleased song. Never digitized."

"So we went into his place and Sam, everything was brand new–maybe a few months old but all barely used. It looked like…" She looked around.

"Well kind of like this." I frowned.

"Anyway, she continued. We listened to the vinyl. The song was amazing by the way. And then he went to the bathroom to "freshen up." She pulled out her phone.

"And on his counter was this." A photo of an Allegheny Mart paystub stared back at me. Daniel's name on the recipient line. And the amount Twenty thousand dollars for marketing and design consultation.

"He just left this out?"

"Oh… no. It was in his mail."

"You opened his mail?"

"Kind of? It wasn't sealed well and I re-sealed it after I took this picture." I stared at the photo. Twenty thousand dollars. That was what he sold my career for.

"This is the proof." I said.

"This proves that he was working with them when I got fired."

"This is definitely the start we need. Now, we can say he slipped up and told me about it or I saw the envelope and get a proper investigation where Allegheny Mart is contacted and they reveal he is the one that did their 'design work.'""Kate! This is amazing. You're amazing! Send me the picture."

"Yeah, well. That's what best friends are for. I can't send you the picture though. I'd get busted for going through his mail. That's a federal offense. I love you girl but I don't want to go to jail."

"You won't go to jail, no one has to know you took the picture." She stared at me dubiously.

"Really?" I thought about the computer systems I'd spent all day mapping. The email servers, and file storage. All the trails I could follow of data that people naively assumed were private. If I'd learned nothing else today, it was that nothing on the internet was private. Every corporation was buying and selling the data ten times over.

There were holes everywhere in security, some even on purpose, funneling the way your eyes tracked a page, or how long you paused on something and sending all of that information on you to other databases where folders of data were compiled. Ever wondered how and why your online ads seem a little too perfect? Well, that's because they are. Nothing is private on the internet. Especially, something you want to be a secret.

"Let me think about it," I said.

"I have a few ideas." After a moment I blurted, "Wait a minute. If everything went so well, how did you just leave?"

"Oh, I told him I started my period and needed to get home before I made a mess. The poor guy was stricken. Like he'd never considered that possibility." I laughed into my wine glass.

"That… is either pure genius, or pure evil." She sighed, "It was so easy that I almost feel bad about it." She peeked one eye open and when she saw my frown added, "almost."